Motorola Q – First Impressions

I managed to get a very brief look at the Motorola Q today so I thought I’d take some shots of it along with my first thoughts. First up – apologies for the quality of the snaps, they were taken with my C600 and the lack of a macro or “close up” facility meant that some are slightly blurry. The Windows Mobile 5.0 (for Smartphone) device packs a 1.3-megapixel camera, 65k color TFT-LCD display, full QWERTY keypad with a five-way navigational key. It’s got dual stereo speakers and even has some funky 3D effects. There’s also Bluetooth support, a miniSD card slot, 64MB Flash memory, GPS, 1XEVDO, 1XRTT, and infrared.

First impressions? Well, it seems a lot smaller than the very early pre-production model I got to play with last year. It measures only 116 x 64 x 12 mm and weighs in at 115g. It’s currently exclusively offered by Verizon Wireless, the US network which gives the CDMA needed by this phone. The lack of a compatible phone network meant I couldn’t play with it much or make phone calls. Here in the UK we use the “GSM” networks, so it’s just not gonna happen until Motorola release a GSM model. To make matters worse there’s no WiFi in this device either, which is a shame. However, I can at least see how well it operates.

Charging the device shows this screen – there’s no “power” light to indicate that the phone is charging or picking up a network (although I must confess to not being able to test the latter as I couldn’t get on a plane to the USA!) :) I must confess that – for a brief moment – I did try and use the screen with my finger. This of course won’t work as it’s a Smartphone-based unit. This doesn’t harm the device at all and the screen, which is crisp and bright, is both big enough to use and small enough to suit the device. The screen itself is the same size as my Orange SPV C600 screen, so you can already tell how tiny this device is – just compare it to the HTC Universal (SPV M5000 / o2 Exec etc) in the background of these shots or the post-it notes below.

The jog wheel on the side is absolutely stunning and the navigation is a dream. Scrolling the wheel around makes the menu highlight positively fly down the screen. Pushing this wheel in selects the item to allow you quick and easy access into your favourite applications. It’s probably a little hard to see here, but the menu is split into 2 rows and 3 columns with the wheel letting you scroll across them and then down onto the next row.

The camera – a 1.3 megapixel – is fast and responsive although I really wished that it would use the whole width of the screen. I felt as annoyed as many do when they’ve just spent money on a wide-screen TV, only to find that a TV station is still broadcasting everything in “square” mode. I took a couple of quick shots, which I’ve not resized. The first is a picture of my SPV C600 here, followed by a shot of the trees outside the office – this was taken on the maximum (6x) zoom here. The images came out fine, although there seemed to be some strange pixelation, which I presume was due to me not having the camera settings correct (these images are only 640×480 each at 64k so I obviously didn’t have it on the higher 1280×1024 resolution). The flash is incredibly bright and I’d imagine it would work well.

The keyboard has a rubbery tactile feel to it and emits and blue glow which gives the device extra cool appeal. The centre joypad is slightly raised and helps to stop mis-hitting the soft keys either side.

On the left side you’ve got your IR port, the mini USB charge / sync plug and the MiniSD slot. This is hidden beneath a pretty annoying bit of rubber, which you’ll probably break within seconds. It’s not clear which end you’re supposed to “pull” at, but once you do open it you’ll probably get used to never having to remove it again.

Summing up, I loved the size of this device. It’s not a Pocket PC, it’s nowhere near the size of one – not even the tiny Pocket PC’s like the TMobile MDA etc. It’s thin, it’s definitely a phone first and its QWERTY keyboard works well. This, from the brief moment I had to play with it, should perform and sell well.